Friday, February 19, 2016

Harper Lee: obituary “To Kill a Mockingbird” author – THE WORLD

Nelle Harper Lee wrote two literary history. Once, as with writers usual, with a pen; the second time she opened Truman Capote, her best friend and worst enemy, the doors. In the second week of December 1959, the two set out for Holcomb (Kansas). In the “New York Times” Capote had read about the gruesome murder of the Clutter farm family: four dead, including two children, almost executed in a big, lonely house.

The culprit, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, into which Capote also fell in 1965 died by hanging. “In Cold Blood”, the historical novel, the Capote wrote about the event, coined the “New Journalism”, made its author famous and ruined him as an artist.

the dedication of the novel was so vicious as the late Capote, who rose slander to an art form, “Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in love and gratitude”, stands there to this day. Dunphy, you have to know in 1967 Capote’s current lover and had nothing to do with “In Cold Blood”. Harper Lee, however had in the first place the book.

Photo: picture alliance / dpa “I’m a character in”: the American writer Truman Capote (1924 until 1984)

with their emotional intelligence they had opened the eccentric Capote in the godforsaken Holcomb doors. Also came the central transcripts to interviews and research of her. As Capote “In Cold Blood” designed, he referred again and again to “NL’s notes” on Nelles notes. Harper Lee was to mention in the same breath as Dunphy humiliation.



This is a book that every man who has

She had a simple reason: The” childhood friend “had meanwhile become famous all on its own. In 1960 her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, which it won the Pulitzer Prize in, and already Capote euphoric announcement of this book had sounded strangely unreal: “On July 11,” he wrote in the spring of 1960 to the film producer David O . Selznick, “brings a wonderful book Lippincott out: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.” What it actually inspired the book, Capote told only in postscript: “I am a character named Dill in it.”

After all, that was true. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an autobiographical book, believed what the writers say every man carries within itself – but hardly anyone as Harper Lee, formed a classic.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” forms, as far as art can ever, Harper Lee’s Kids World one to one: Maycomb, the venue, Monroeville, Alabama, motherless Scout is Harper Lee himself, scouts friend dill is Nelles friend Truman Capote, and Atticus Finch (consisting in the English translation is not called more comprehensible reasons Fink) is Harper Lee’s father, the lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee, from the novel makes one of the biggest Beschützer- and slipstream figures who knows the literature in general.

Where truth and wishful thinking separate

Photo: picture-alliance / akg-images In the 1962 film version of “to Kill a Mockingbird” was Gregory Peck seen as lawyer Atticus Finch

Even the court drama in the center of the plot has a real role model: the trial of the Black Tom Robinson, who allegedly raped a white woman, reflects the case the 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with a white woman.

In the novel takes Atticus Finch Tom Robinson’s defense, saves him from the lynch mob and despite the obvious innocence of his client must fail: “In the secret courts of the heart “writes Harper Lee was Atticus’ not admitted as a defender.”

and somewhere here truth and fiction, autobiography and wishful thinking separate. In Harper Lee Atticus her father has a memorial out of sheer admiration set while angedichtet him antiracist convictions, his and her long were much later advance.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” thus became an important text for the American civil rights movement. Part flourished the novel on their soil, partly he prepared this ground thanks to its broad impact only the heart knocking optimism of the Kennedy Years -. Here he has become literature

“I am small but. old “

But it is in the novel not about politics alone: ​​the desire for an ideal America stands between all lines of this book. That “To Kill a Mockingbird” developed into something like a favorite book America, a classic that always remained a bestseller, so at some point even America’s “national novel” called him, both sepia colors, where Harper Lee to owe south American painting, as well as the anchor of the story in a still vivid narrative tradition, which goes back to Mark Twain.

In Maycomb slip Scout and Dill again in the old clothes of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. “I’m small, but old,” says Truman “Dill” Capote, as Harper “Scout” Lee looks perching him for the first time in the kale perennials.

Harper Lee’s novel has become so not only classics, but folklore. It weaves a myth around him and his characters, the mysterious Boo Radley, for example, like a ghost in hiding lived in the novel until he saves the children at the crucial moment and yet still provides for justice. As the publication of the novel jährte for the fiftieth time, the celebrations as a folk festival took in Monroeville, the now “literary capital of Alabama” calls itself, from – only that Harper Lee is no longer the role of small Scout, but that of the invisible Boo Radley played

Photo:. REUTERS It was not easy, Harper Lee to bestow an honor – many awards she leaned just starting. 2007 succeeded George W. Bush, after all, give it to the “Medal of Freedom”

It’s hard to Harper Lee’s story after telling great success, and who, as the biographer Charles J. Shields, has attempted this had to make do without the aid of Harper Lee. It is certain that she has never completed a book; it is also certain that they worked seriously on at least one. For a long time she lived part of the year in New York, where she wrote, nothing brought to perfection and apparently struggled not only with her manuscript, but also with the alcohol.

one to Truman Capote vulgarities these years that he wrote the rumor, not his girlfriend Nelle, but he himself had “To Kill a Mockingbird”, never has done away with. Harper Lee eventually returned all the way to Monroeville, where she lived with her sisters – the eldest, Alice was now slipped into the role of Atticus. The Finch’s, so it is already in Harper Lee novel, were “a race in which outweighed the daughters”.

Around the mid-sixties is Harper Lee silent as a public figure; Awards that were plotted her more often, they initially took not, later, as an old woman, even in the White House with no more than a “thank you” counter. She did not want to play the fool, she said – as were the last desperate attempts, but to write again, probably long behind her

mid. eighties, soon after Capote’s death, Harper Lee had once knocked for research purposes for a lawyers office – but the fact Roman, whose appearance she promised the lawyer in a strange telephone call for the next week, was a phantom. The times of “In Cold Blood” were over, and the nightingale had been disturbed: you no longer sang. The success of her only novel, it entrusted the old Harper Lee no biographer, but a curious New York waiter, have simply “overwhelmed”.

Photo: DVA 2015 appeared again a Harper Lee book was, however, already emerged decades earlier: “Go, set a watchman.” Cover of the German edition, which is published by DVA

And as last year but then again appeared a new book under her name, was of course under the eternal spell of old: Harper Lee’s first version of “to Kill a Mockingbird”, which for decades had lain in its archive, “Go, set a watchman” in the summer of 2015 under the title released.

In this they all emerged again on, Scout, Tom Robinson – and especially Atticus, which in this original version of the substance is not his final moves as idealized civil carries, but partly unbearable making racist sayings. “Go, set a watchman” was once, been rejected in the fifties by the publisher. Perhaps because it is the weaker point. Or more honest.

In “To Kill a Mockingbird” makes Atticus Finch that the spooks same Boo Radley despite his prowess may continue to live in hiding. Now Nelle Harper Lee, who wrote two literary history and the fame did not escape, died at the age of 89 years.

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